Agents are likely to struggle

Server-side render your homepage so AI crawlers see meaningful content without JavaScript. Ensure an H1 and 500+ chars of text in raw HTML.

Allowlist known AI agent User-Agents (ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, DeepSeekBot) in your WAF or bot-detection rules.

Publish an OpenAPI (Swagger) specification at /openapi.json or /api/openapi.yaml. This is how agents understand your API surface automatically.

On the responses that serve text/markdown via Accept negotiation, add Accept to the Vary header (Vary: Accept, Accept-Encoding). Without it, CDNs can serve the cached HTML variant to an agent asking for markdown (or vice versa), depending on which variant landed in cache first.

Verify that major agent User-Agents can reach the homepage. If your WAF or bot rules block them, remove or narrow the blocking rule. Add an allow rule only when your security setup denies them by default.

Return structured JSON error responses with error codes, messages, and resolution hints. Agents can't parse HTML error pages.

Return a real HTTP 404 (or 410) status for nonexistent paths - never a 200 with your app shell, which makes agents believe every path exists. For full credit, give the 404 response a short markdown body pointing agents at your sitemap, llms.txt, or docs index. Verify with curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://yourdomain.com/some-path-that-does-not-exist - it must print 404.

Make your developer resources (API docs, OpenAPI spec, auth docs, webhooks, MCP server) discoverable by name. Publish them at predictable URLs, list them in llms.txt, and include your product name in page titles and headings so search engines surface them for name-based queries.

Make sure a clean search for your brand name returns your own domain in the top results. If it does not, your brand may be too generic, conflict with a more established term, or not yet indexed. Strengthen brand-name search by claiming consistent NAP across listings, earning press mentions that link to the canonical domain, and avoiding redirect chains that mask the apex domain in search results.

Add a valid XML sitemap at /sitemap.xml listing all indexable URLs. Include lastmod dates and keep it under 50MB.

Add JSON-LD structured data to your homepage using the identity type that matches your site - SoftwareApplication for products, Organization or LocalBusiness for companies, Person for personal sites, Article for blogs - with name, description, url, and type-appropriate fields (offers, sameAs, author) so AI can parse your identity programmatically.

Publish API documentation at a discoverable URL (/docs, /api, /developers). Include authentication, endpoints, and example requests.

Tell agents when to reach for you: add a 'when to use this' section to your llms.txt (or a dedicated agent-instructions file) that names your best-fit use cases and how an agent should call you. Be specific about the jobs you are right for - generic marketing copy does not read as guidance.

Add all four signals to your homepage: , , , and . Agents use these for entity resolution and attribution.

Add Organization JSON-LD that includes both contactPoint (with email/phone and contactType) and address (PostalAddress). This lets AI verify your business legitimacy and answer contact queries.

Publish real /about, /contact, and /privacy pages with at least 500 characters of content each. These are the pages AI agents check to verify your business is legitimate before recommending you.

Create a developer portal at /developers with API keys, documentation, quickstart guides, and a sandbox environment.

Expose a public REST or GraphQL API. AI agents need programmatic access - not just a web UI - to integrate with your product.

Build an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server exposing your API as tools. Use Streamable HTTP transport for full score. This lets Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI agents call your product natively.

Return standard rate-limit headers on your API responses (the RFC RateLimit headers, plus Retry-After on a 429) so agents can self-throttle in real time, and document the conventions alongside your API.

Publish an official CLI tool on npm, PyPI, or Homebrew. A CLI lets agents and developers script interactions with your product without building API integrations from scratch.

Make your API spec self-describing: a unique operationId and a description on every operation, typed parameters, and response schemas. For GraphQL, a fully typed schema with a documented cost or rate limit reads best.

Ensure API endpoints have unique operation IDs, typed schemas, and descriptions compatible with LLM function-calling formats.

Establish a Wikipedia article and a Wikidata entity for your brand, with the domain set as the official website (Wikidata property P856) and a corresponding external link on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the largest single source of citations in ChatGPT and a primary input to Knowledge Graphs across Google, Bing, and LLM training data. Earn third-party press coverage first to satisfy notability, then draft the article with cited references rather than self-promotion.

Publish agent skills on skills.sh so AI agents can discover your product's capabilities. Create a SKILL.md in your GitHub repo and register it with 'npx skills add'. See skills.sh/docs.

Serve your MCP server at /.well-known/mcp, publish a server-card.json at /.well-known/mcp/server-card.json, or reference it in llms.txt so agents can discover it automatically without manual URL input.

Expand your skills.sh presence with multiple skill repos covering different use cases. Add descriptive skill names, clear SKILL.md files, and organize by capability area.

Protect your MCP server with OAuth 2.0 authentication. Publish authorization server metadata at /.well-known/oauth-authorization-server for automatic agent auth flows.

Implement Microsoft's NLWeb protocol by adding a POST /ask endpoint that accepts natural-language queries and returns JSON with _meta (response_type, version). See github.com/microsoft/NLWeb.